Last week was my vacation. Didn’t have anywhere to go, so I drank too much and installed Linux on my machine at home. Gave it about 1/4 of my total hard disk space -15GB (half of my second drive).
It seems to be pretty okay. The modem and printer are putting up a fight, but I’ll conquer them eventually. Mostly I’m installing stuff in a cookbook fashion. I installed an older Blender version (the one that came with the manual) and it works fine. Well, okay, the static version works fine. I’ll figure out how to get the dynamic version working at some point.
Just letting you all know what I’ve been up to, and giving you the heads up since I’ll be bugging the Blender-Linux folk on the Q&A board over these coming months.
You’re in for an interesting experience. Sometimes you’ll wonder “What were they thinking,” and other times you’ll appreciate all the flexibility it offers. You’ll eventually have to decide which side of the “Gnome or KDE” desktop fence you prefer, but they’re both pretty nice.
Welcome back from the dark side .
Linux/Unix takes some getting used to, like typing / instead of\ for the file paths, but once you learn it, it’s really hard to go back.
I’ve used Mac/Win OSes for years. I didn’t find an interesting OS until I installed RH Linux on my notebook. It’s been a trail at time but also a wonderful learning experience. I prolly will never purchase a non linux system for myself(my wife is a mac evangelist so she’ll continue to get macs).
One of the most important things I’ve leared is how much time it will take to solve a specific problem in linux(they’re not problems, they’re challenges, right?). At first every problem requires learning something new, but after a while you DO get the hang of it.
So far I’m finding myself bolting out of work as soon as I can so I can get home to fire up my system. I’ve got Linux as the default for startup, so I can still shoose Windows if I need it (like for getting online or printing).
I’ve got both Gnome and KDE, and can use either one just fine, but right now I’m prefering the shell for setting stuff up because otherwise it’s invisible to me. Reminds me of when I first started adapting to Win3.0 - The only way I could deal with using a GUI (yes, I know that it wasn’t an OS) was to edit the ini files by hand to make changes. And even then I still preferred DOS.
Okay, now I feel old.
I’m trying to stick to the shell as much as possible until I get it all close to how I want it. It’s going to take awhile to get used to compiling programs before installing them, but for now I’m thankful for RPMs.
Seriously, though, I’m glad that I’ve got Blender and GIMP running. Okay, so GIMP installed itself and I didn’t have to deal with the libraries. Next I’ll need to get a better handle on things so I can set up and run POV-Ray. (Yes, I know it’s not the best raytracer, but it has such a spirit of true freedom!)
Ugh, the day has just started. It will be at least nine hours before I can get back to it.
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